Transfer a Playlist from iPhone, iPod, or iPad to iTunes

Do you have a music playlist on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad that you want to move to iTunes on your computer? It’s fairly easy:

Connect the iPod, iPhone to the computer and launch iTunes

Under the “Devices” menu locate the playlist you want to copy to the computer and right-click on the playlist name, then select “Export”

Name the playlist and select “XML” as the filetype format and save the file to somewhere easy to find, like the desktop

Pull down the “File” menu, go to “Library” and now select “Import Playlist”, choosing the XML playlist file you exported in the previous step

The playlist from the iOS device is now in iTunes on the computer, find it under the Playlists menu. You will obviously need to have the music featured in the playlist within iTunes in order for the playlist to work, if you don’t have the music because you switched computers you will need to transfer the music from the iOS device to the computer first.

This is a great solution if you’ve lost playlists from iTunes and the standard recovery process didn’t work, or if you’ve just spent a lot of time customizing playlists directly on an iOS device and you now want to enjoy them on the computer.

This works the same in Mac OS X and Windows.

Thanks to Jennifer for the tip idea

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40 Comments

Thanks Jennifer this saved a bunch of time for me. I used a duplicate remover tool for iTunes and lost my playlist. The play list were still in the side colum but the info was gone. This worked grate for me I can’t thank you enough!

What if the playlist doesn’t show up under device? I created it on my phone, and it is still there and working, but doesn’t show up under with the other playlists under device when my iphone is connected to itunes.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
This saved so much time and was so easy….
And didn’t try to sell me software like the first four search results (software I did NOT buy…as you can tell from my website name “cynical musings”, I am fairly cynical…ha-ha).

Thank you so much. I called Apple and they told me once I transferred my iTunes library if I didn’t see all my playlists I was pretty much out of luck and had to MANUALLY add them all back. I didn’t believe them and found your help page. Thanks again!

Worked flawlessly. Placed all of the playlists into a folder i created called itunes playlist. Tried to import them all at the same time but ended up doing it individually. May have cost me 1 minute to import 10 playlists. Quite simple indeed!

My computer crashed, but I had my iTunes library on a secondary disk. I’ve got iTunes installed on my new computer and moved my whole library over, but my playlists aren’t there. My next thought is to plug in my iPod, get iTunes to see it – but not to sync yet (don’t want to delete my playlists on my iPod!), then follow your directions above to get them back in iTunes.

I accidentally deleted one of my favorite playlist this morning from iTunes. Performed several searches on the web for way too recover the playlist. The first procedure I found wanted me to move a file from the iTunes directory to the desktop. Then delete another file from the same directory and then import the moved file back to iTunes. This procedure did not work. I wondered if it was possible to restore the playlist from my iPhone back into iTunes. I located Jennifer’s write up on the procedure, followed her instructions and restored my playlist. My thanks to Jennifer.

Why doesn’t my iTunes have “import playlist” after I choose file-library? I also chose “add file to library” and this did not work. Any suggestions? I have a new pc and all of my iTunes music transferred but none of my playlists did. Thank you!

Thanks for the great advice. This worked with my regular playlists, but not for my smart playlists. I lost all my ratings on iTunes after a computer crash, but I have two large smart playlists (my top rated and 5 stars) based on my ratings still on my iPad. When I follow this method for them, iTunes still treats them as smart playlists and only includes songs I’ve re-rated. Can you think of any way around this, other than re-rating all of my songs?